Grrl Power #1317 – Beige quo
Peggy’s seen some nasty stuff in combat, but she was almost entirely spared the more visceral elements of losing her leg, as she passed out when Max hiked the Pave Hawk, then woke up post surgery. No one ever showed her a photo of her leg, though she did see an X-Ray of it, which helped her come to terms with why it needed to be removed instead of her trying to live with about 600 transdermal metal pins jutting through her shin and calf and foot trying to hold all of the flinders in place while it healed.
Still, as an advanced space doctor/technician, there’s no reason to risk your patient hwarfing in your surgical suite on the off chance thet them seeing the inside of their own tibia being reconstructed causes their vagus nerve to start doing the cha-cha.
Olden-time doctors had to know how to harvest willow tree bark or how to grind up the right concoction of herbs or know which ailments being pecked by a bluejay would cure. High-tech doctors have to know to push the NIBP button before activating the anti-borborygmi field, lest it cause an epistaxis inversion. They’re all technicians in their own right. If Peggy implied that being a space doctor simply involved pusing a single button, Frix might have been insulted, but he wouldn’t have “spit on her muffin,” which in this case would mean… putting her foot on backwards? It’s hard to come up with a limb-replantation equivalent. Maybe switching the nerves for her pinky and index toe.
I keep forgetting to mention, I have a BlueSky account now, since that seems to be a proper successor to Twitter. I’ll be posting in both places for the foreseeable future.
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Space Docs also have to know what to do when the machine stops working.
slap them on the hindquarters, give them the bill and any meds along with the owner’s manual. (certified genuine space eagle medic)
I’m reminded of the time on Star Trek Voyager where the doctor was only able to save one patient because he didn’t have time to talk anyone through the extremely complex procedure of…waving a light thingy up and down….just like every other medical procedure he ever did…
In one episode (or movie), the doctor complained that the “technology was from the dark ages” and then he grabbed a scanner and waved it around and fixed everything in seconds.
Favorite Example of that from Star Trek IV The Journey Home: Mercy Hospital Scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJNgA1n0er0&t=1s
Bones is a quack: take away his magic wands and magic-pills, and he wouldn’t know which end of a scalpel to use (he has probably never seen the inside of a patient in decades, if ever)
Same with Scotty who thought you had to talk to a computer and didn’t know what a mouse was!
But then typed faster than anything I have ever seen .. on a keyboard type he never used before
“about 600 transdermal metal pins jutting through her shin and calf and foot”
I expect the biggest issue in her case was the vascular damage and extended period without circulation. When I broke my leg the bones were shattered, though they only bothered lining up a half dozen of the pieces, but what nearly lost me my foot were the blood vessels cut up by the bone fragments, and the extended period my foot went without much circulation.
In her case the foot was probably just dead meat by the time she reached the field hospital. If they’d left it on she’d have been looking at gangrene.
Crush damage (force or pressure on a body part) is pretty insidious. Even if the bones are alright and there is feeling and mobility in the toes or fingers, muscle has serious issues when the pressure it released. (Yes, this is a problem with tourniquet use lasting more than 2 hours.) The muscle has been using anaerobic respiration and there is a build up of all the fun by-products that will cause problems for the heart and kidneys (acute renal failure). The damage leads to fluid build up in the muscle and a nasty condition called compartment syndrome which causes further damage to muscles and nerves distal the the injury. This requires immediate evacuation to the hospital even when there is no injury to the bone. By the time the pain hits, the limb cannot be saved.
As a professor of mine used to emphasize: Bone fractures are injuries to the SOFT tissues that also happen to involve one or more bones breaking. Reassembling your bones can nearly always be done, but if the soft tissues are too damaged, then putting all your bones back in the right place won’t actually help much. This was then followed by several less-than-pleasant x-ray slides where we played the game ‘what body part do you think this was?’.
He could mess with the size/placement of soft tissues in the ankle joint if he took a disliking to her.
Got an old soft tissue injury in mine from about 20 years ago, feels like somebody has stabbed a big flathead screwdriver in there and *twisted* it at random times.
Doesn’t feel good man.
I hear you, I racked mine up over 50 years ago and I’m still cautious about where I step since it ‘rolls’ easily. The ‘Dr’ at the time diagnosed a sprain without taking x-rays, the epitome of socialized medicine, and just taped it up, then when I rolled it six ir seven years later the military Dr did take x-rays and said I’d sprained it but the three old breaks hadn’t healed properly and were…the medical term he used was “all messed up” and the ligaments were pretty much non-existant…but there was nothing he could do about it. I must have rolled it a couple of dozen times by now but I made it through twenty years in the military and another twenty five in a fairly physical job afterward, just using sick time when it rolled. Luckily it only laid me up for a couple of days at a time but it’s a weird sensation feeling your foot disconnect from your ankle and slide a couple of inches up the side of your leg then waiting for the sudden rush of pain when it snaps back in place.
To this day I wear tightly laced ‘combat boots’ mostly. Oxfords or other low shoes or sneakers are just asking for trouble.
Likewise when hiking. In a normal setting I can get away with sneakers, but anywhere I’m likely to hit uneven ground boots are essential.
sux2bu
I was kinds hoping they could fit Peggy with a plug-and-play set of legs. ‘Yes General Shinybum, that is my Parade leg, that is my sniper rifle with laser target designator leg, that is my ‘melt MBT’s at 5 kilometers’ leg…..can I check your Security clearance before I discuss the orbital strike options leg?’
I’m waiting for the day when medicine catches up to “The Fifth Element” and body parts can be basically hyper 3D printed like how Leeloo was brought back to life in the beginning of that movie.
She wasn’t ‘brought back to life’, she was created from alien DNA and some random blueprint they found
Other than that, good point
Nah, her whole body got destroyed except for one hand, and they printed the whole rest of her body onto the hand. Which does kind of raise the question of how exactly she retained any memories, of course.
The Fifth Element wasn’t exactly hard science fiction
On the way to the operating room, the doctor mentions the extremely high number of “memo-groups” found in Leeloo’s cells. Presumably this something like the genes needed for encoding instincts in a standard organism, turned up to 11, and meant to handwave away the memory question
well she did spend almost a quarter of the movie learning how to talk and comunicate properly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-uvOpMyPgI (The Fifth Element – The Creation of Leeloo)
the DNA is the same as ours, there are simply much more, with full genetic knowledge ..
They are already doing that, although it’s in the extremely preliminary stage. They’ve 3d printed various body parts including a heart valve and a knee meniscus out of living tissue.
My mother was saved a year and a half ago by one of those heart valves. I still thank the medical team and surgeons especially, every darn holiday i can.
Don’t believe that was a translator error so much as an idiom error
Or maybe he has never had a baked muffin
Frix was totally going for sexual innuendo. I can think of several parts to which this sequence could be applied, all of which Sydney would probably have a problem with. Remember Frix is part of Cora’s crew. He isn’t a prudish descendant of puritanical English fleeing England.
We just had Thanksgiving, has anyone else not remembered that the people that landed on Plymouth Rock called themselves Puritans? Then never thought to find out why? The same descendants who put on the Salem witch trials? You need to decide what part of History you want to be like.
The translated turned a ephemisn for spite into one for sex related stuff. so I’m guessing that dabbler was the one to supply the earth language side of the translator software..
[In the mess hall]
Peggy: Frix, this is what I was referring to when I talked about a muffin that got spat on.
Frix: So, what Sydney was calling a muffin top…
Peggy: If she’s getting one of those, we need to put her through more P.T.
I’m sure Sydney would vouch that, while Frix is a very skilled physician, he is just as skilled a technician when it comes to ‘spitting on her muffin.’
If she didn’t implode in embarrassment when you asked, at least.
Good thing Frix checked first before going with a shade of blue :)
When the truck hit me and mangled my leg twenty-odd years ago the nerves were all scrambled, and for years after touching one part of my foot felt like another part of my foot was getting touched. which was really fvc|<ed up. And then there was the traumatic neuropathy making my foot feel things that were not actually happening, like for a while if I sat too long I would feel like my foot was on fire and my toes were being crushed sometimes, both at once, but usually just one or the other. But yes, nerves can get rewired if the hamburger is bad enough in the damaged area.
So when they’re feeling the wrong thing, what do you do to get them to stop feeling the wrong thing? Is it like self-stimming where you poke yourself so you know that the feeling you’re feeling is the one that you intended to feel?
If being pecked by a blue jay doesnt fix the issue, you can always try a donkey kicking! I need to rewatch a thousand ways to die in the old west…
I’ve read an old letter written to someone back East claiming that the local sawbones recommended drinking rattlesnake venom now and then for what sounded like arthritis symptoms. Hell knows if the doc actually believed it or was just jerking with some new guy, but apparently he warned that patient that actually getting bit wouldn’t help, you needed to drink the stuff.
Pretty much literal snake oil medicine, regardless.
https://www.israel21c.org/relieving-the-pain-of-arthritis-with-snake-venom/
This is the least “science lingo heavy” article I found, but the internet is full of scientific studies showing that snake venom in general can be used for pain relief and arthritis.
Just because something wasn’t made by a pharmaceutical company doesn’t mean its “fake medicine”. After all, the original Penicillin was mould found on an orange in 1942, Aspirin was refined from Willow Bark, which was used for pain relief for over 3,000 years, and Snake Venom has been used to create medicine to treat everything from cardiovascular disease to pain relief in cancer patients
Only advantage of pharmaceutical varieties is they tend to be the pure form of the chemical that is important, abled to be exactly dosed out to prevent adverse reactions
A lot of animal-derived venoms and poisons are either potent, natural blood-thinners or neurotoxins (which, in tiny, controlled doses can potentially treat nerve disorders, or, like botox, be used to disable muscles). Naturally, do NOT attempt at home. Pharmaceutical medicine is refined for safety reasons.
And as far as Joe’s question, microwounds in the mouth can prove lethal if ingesting snake (and probably other) venoms.
Get two snake bites and call me in the morning….
IIRC, most hunting venom is going to be like that, the digestion breaks it down, it has to be injected into the blood stream to cause damage (I don’t know how microwounds in the mouth work). Defensive venom is much less likely to work like that I think.
Basically. Or just identify reality as hthr incorrect sensations come up. The human brain will eventually rewire itself to match.
…I wouldn’t mind spitting on her muffin.
Friz has excellent bedside manner. I am not going to suggest to my wife that I spit in her muffin. Her foot would probably go innmyendo
Kudos on incorporating George Carlin’s “borborygmi”!
Underused word, considering how often one encounters the phenomenon.
When I was blown up in Iraq I *did* get to see the resulting damage, live and in technicolor. I am weirdly fine with seeing various invasive medical techniques used on myslef, but still am not fond of watching others be injured or worked on, so I guess it’s all a bit subjective.
Oh absolutely. As a young teenager I had my foot basically flayed open by a falling fluorescent lightbulb. Seeing my own bones regularly for a week (Because compound fracture and small foot yay…). I am almost completely desensitized to seeing my own skeleton without the aid of X-rays…which may or may not be a good thing considering that I nearly bled out from a work-related hand injury that I didn’t really acknowledge because I could only ‘sorta’ see the bone…
Yeah, as a kid I fell and split my knee open, revealing my patella for all to see (at least until it got covered with blood).
I’d hate to see how the translator handles “hawk tuah”.
“What is that; some kind of bird?”
This is why patients are unconscious during surgery in case someone says some thing that makes them burst out laughing.
I just saw this:
https://x.com/MaikaMIAKA/status/1873471745170268240?t=c6fz4T8dWfN6vmjfxl-EEg&s=19
And it made me wonder if four-armed beings (like Dabbler) prefer to be with people having multiple heads, or if maybe people having multiple heads prefer being with four-armed beings.
Like, if Cerberus was a furry and had a boyfriend, would she want her boyfriend to have four arms so he could caress all three of her heads at the same time?
Thank you for reading my ADHD brain ramblings. You are now free to go about your day.
and the page no longer exists -.-
If he was annoyed with her, I’d assume he’d put her toes on mirrored.
Reversing the knee joint would be my top concern.
Boy would she walk funny.
So she Was going with the all natural one and not hiding a shotgun etc. inside model.
Apropos of nothing, but there’s a beautiful young lady, American I think, who competes in seated volleyball in the Paralympics with one foot that’s backwards. (It was reconstructed that way on purpose, for reasons I’ve forgotten; the foot is also attached where her knee used to be.)
I have no knowledge of anyone spitting on anyone else’s muffin in her case.
*shudders* I think you just described it. What did she do for the surgeon to do that to her. >>
Found her: https://news.uthscsa.edu/jillians-leap/
Her knee had cancer, so they replaced it with her ankle instead.
FYI, “borborygmus” = “rumbleguts.”
I don’t know why I know that.
But I did once make a pair of tribes for a D&D campaign called Borborygmi and Stertorii (“snorers.”) I explained this as nicknames given to them by Imperial spies sneaking through their encampments at night. They called themselves Kickassians and Wuppertailians.
That is also peak 17th to 19th Century Explorer. Hire a native guide on the coast, head inland a few weeks, then ask the guide what something is called, like a river. The guide doesn’t know, so the river gets named ‘F**cked if I know’ in the guide’s native language. The Explored is mystified at how this river seems to snake all over the place and flow backwards. A few years/decades later people start asking ‘What was that Explorer on, those are all separate rivers’
Sydney has some really strange ideas. I was gonna say sometimes, but I realised this isn’t an occasional thing, it’s frequent.
My wife is a wild bird rehabber, the answer to the question regarding “which ailments being pecked by a bluejay would cure” is Everything :)
Poor Peggy….. My wife loves showing pictures of when 2 of her fingers were turned into the appearance of ground up exploded bratwurst. Only true friends can send each other running to the bathroom to evacuate their lunch…